Tom Philpott over at Grist has written an insightful piece (Victual Reality: Skewed View from the Berkeley Hills) in response to Kim Severson's article in last Wednesday's New York Times, Some Good News on Food Prices.
I agree with Philpott about the idealism that underlies Waters' and
Pollan's belief that rising food prices will necessarily be good for
local and sustainable agriculture, especially given the position from
which both of them view the food landscape in the United States. Both
are based in the Bay Area, a part
of the country that is famous for its social conscience, which
translates into (among other things) a well-established culture of
support for local agriculture. But really: both of them have to have
seen enough evidence, whether right there in California or as they've
traveled, to know how far we still have to go to inspire the concern
among the masses required of reaching a tipping point on sustainable
agriculture.
I won't purport to understand the whole picture myself, but living in
New York City, it's hard not to see what's right here: affluent
neighborhoods filled with natural food stores, co-ops, and restaurants
touting their seasonal and local menus edging right up against poorer
neighborhoods whose grocery stores offer little variety of damaged or otherwise unappealing produce,
where options for dining out rarely stray from fast food, and poverty supplants whatever concern there
is for responsible agriculture or organic food. That is to say, cheap
food is better than no food.
Don't get me wrong... Greenmarkets are popping up in underserved neighborhoods all over the five boroughs - a decent number of which now accept EBT
- and programs designed to teach kids about farming and health seem to
be on the increase. But it's incredibly presumptuous to say that rising
food prices will naturally lead poorer people to switch to local foods.
They could,
but knowledge of and access to that alternative must exist first. That
includes finding ways to dispel local eating as a privilege of an elite
few, connecting city-dwellers with farms and giving them a stake in
what happens to them, and instilling a sense of agency over food
choices in consumers across the board.
Until there is a sea change in both education and policy - not just
food prices - the reality is probably closer to Philpott's: those who
can't afford more expensive food (or simply believe in bargain-hunting)
will continue to seek out the cheapest choices they are aware of. And
given that the stalled 2008 Farm Bill doesn't promise much by way of
radical change, this seems to mean that food made from heavily
subsidized commodity crops, i.e. fast food and its synonyms on grocery
store shelves, will continue to be cheaper.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though. And that's not something I say too often.
Gristmill: More on last week's Victual Reality column
